Newcastle United was a club on its knees when Rafa Benitez arrived in March 2016 – and changed everything.

New book Inside the Rafalution is the story of a football club that had lost touch with its community and sense of purpose – and how one man was able to inspire a city to fall in love with its team again. It looks at how Benitez changed everything – from the lighting in the canteen to the team’s losing mentality, bringing you right to the heart of why his burning, obsessional drive to find solutions makes him the perfect fit for one of English football’s most bewildering clubs. Benitez signed 12 players in the summer of 2016 and sold six decades of experience. He overhauled the way the club operated and inspired a staff. This is a story of how to manage – not just the corners, the free-kicks and team, but an organisation that had been shelled out by years of frustration and underachievement.

In the third part of our serialisation, this is how Benitez’s impact ensured United would never go back to the days of head coaches.

A few days before the 2016/17 season – this long, marathon campaign – concluded, Rafa Benitez was asked what he made of the term ‘Rafalution’.

It is a shorthand phrase for the huge changes made on his watch but it’s not a Newcastle original. It was swiped from Liverpool, where Benitez turned Gerard Houllier’s underachievers into club that secured Europe’s biggest prize in his first season in charge. In six years at Anfield, his personnel, policy and philosophy turned around the Reds.

At Newcastle, he was required to do so much more than just make the club competitive. He had to recalibrate a club that had lost its purpose. The ‘Rafalution’ was about much more than the things that went on at the training ground alone.

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The club liked the phrase, too. From a marketing perspective, it certainly gave them the opportunity to draw a line under what had gone before.

“I’m really pleased with the support of the fans,” he said. “But I think that I don’t like to talk about the ‘Rafalution’, I think that it has been more an evolution of everything.

“By that I mean in terms of the approach, because sometimes when you have a shock it’s how you react. Relegation means that we had to react. We had to start doing things in another way, and that’s what we have done in almost every department of the club.

It has been good in the end because we have been successful.” Benitez has always shied away from the idea that it was him who was responsible for everything that was good at the club. In his eyes, he was an enabler and facilitator for a lot of the changes that happened. He set the tone from the top, but it was the kit man, the analysts, the secretaries, the security guards and the ground staff who responded to the changes that he brought in.

This was partly true, although it was Benitez who added the substance to the rhetoric. Previous managers had spoken about engaging the fans: it was Benitez who turned up at supporter meetings, unexpectedly, or at community events. It was the manager, too, who proved that he cared about the Academy side by watching both of their end-of-season play-off games, when other bosses might have been forgiven for rewarding the efforts of the campaign with a well-earned break.

His actions did help the club. For a long time they had felt cowed by the mistrust. Good initiatives that club staff pioneered or came up with were shelved or flew under the radar because of the poor relations between Newcastle and supporters and the city institutions they had alienated. For example, Newcastle’s match tickets were among the cheapest of the top clubs. It did not get the praise it deserved.

The irony – given his occasional reticence to take unnecessary risks on the pitch – was that Benitez had encouraged the club to take a few more risks off the field. Long before the season ended, they had started to talk to supporter groups about the prospect of a singing section to be congregated in the corner of Gallowgate.

A previous section had been broken up; the club said to enable them to build a section just for families. Supporters thought it was because of anti-Mike Ashley chants.

Other little things began to crop up. Corporate ties were improved.

At the dramatic Norwich City home match, some of the region’s biggest businesses were being entertained – firms who might have shied away from association with the club in previous years.

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The Newcastle United Supporters’ Trust was re-admitted to the club’s Fans’ Forum meetings, having been banned for three years over the way they had communicated at a previous summit.

Local businesses were back in the fold, and they started to work more closely with the council again. The club’s media team were also given access to film more behind-the-scenes footage to share with the supporters. Benitez’s appointment and attitude created a more open club.

Benitez was perhaps being modest when he said it, but he honestly felt that the capacity for the club to act properly was there before he arrived. He just gave it a little push. “It’s not fair to say that it was a low base when we came in, because the structure and the organisation were fine,” he says.

“Then you have to improve maybe in some departments about how you make decisions, or whether you take risks, or not, little things like this.

“The majority of the departments, they were doing well. So it’s just to fix two or three things to be sure that they click together.”

The lesson of Benitez had been learned right at the top. When Lee Charnley was asked what would happen if the manager left – and West Ham had maintained a friendly enough relationship with him after his rejection to make those fears something to take seriously – he admitted that the club could not go back to the head-coach days. It had taught those in charge of the club that there was an importance about appointing a figure with the right experience, cache and personality to turn the club around.

That, surely, was the Rafalution in a nutshell. The Mike Ashley era had seen the club ignore overtures from supporters, media and experts that they needed to change direction. But Benitez’s appointment had put them right. Even without Benitez, the implication is that Newcastle would never go back to the small-time way of thinking that preceded him. The realisation that a manager of cache, charisma and possessing of broad shoulders was required will be part of his legacy, wherever Newcastle go from here. That is some change to inspire.

Inside The Rafalution by Mark Douglas RRP £9.99 is on sale for only £7.99 from The Chronicle front counter, 0845 143 0001 and www.sportmediashop.com . The paperback will also be on sale in all good book stores and Amazon, and the ebook edition is available through Kindle and Apple.